Night Magic (35 page)

He paused again—for effect, Michael was sure—puffing his pipe and giving a scratch or two, looking up to where some birds shot across the roof into the plane of sunlight that was already moving into shadow. Michael waited to learn the connection between the miraculous ikon and the equally miraculous “Saskia in Tears.”

“Well,” the master continued at last, “as a token of gratitude for the monks’ hospitality, Christatos arranged that we would put on a little magic show in the garden and devoutly requested that the holy ikon be carried there to bless our undertaking. Somehow he persuaded the abbot to accede to his request. Our alfresco performance was an impromptu affair, since we had no props, but we did well enough with silks and coins and such sketchy materials—as you know, real magicians can work under any circumstances.

“The good brothers admired our efforts quite thoroughly, and finally, as the sun was beginning to set, Christatos announced a special treat for them: we would demonstrate the true efficacy of their gold ikon. He directed their attention to the statue at the far end of the garden, enclosed in a circle of yew, light enough to see, but melting all around into shadows. With elaborate apologies he borrowed the ikon from the abbot, who had stood there clutching it to his bony chest the whole time, and held it up before him. He adjusted the angle so that the fading rays of the sun reflected off the ikon and cast a golden beam onto the drab face of the statue. All eyes were on it as it turned its shoulder ever so slightly and inclined its head in a most quizzical manner, as if saying, ‘Why are you so surprised, you little Greek monks? I am stiff in my neck joints and must give them a creak or two.’

“This remarkable demonstration set the brothers abuzz, and they leaped to their feet to view the miracle more closely, but by the time they could inspect it the statue had resumed its original form and nothing could make it budge. Then there arose a debate among the monks as to the nature of the miracle: had Christatos’s wizardry induced those particles of stone to shift themselves, or was it truly the miraculous power of the weeping ikon? But the outcome of that debate is another story, and so is the fate of the ikon, which, as you must have guessed, Christatos had managed to spirit away during the confusion.”

The master sagged and sighed, moving his shoulders around in his coat and recrossing his knees. Michael looked around the garden and saw that everyone else had gone; they were alone, and the master had stopped talking, but it was clear that the lesson was not over. “When did this happen?” Michael asked.

The master emitted his melodrama-villain’s chuckle. “Long ago, my boy, long ago. Let us say some time before you were born.” This pronouncement seemed to amuse him, and he chuckled still more fearfully.

“Okay. And you actually saw the statue move?”

“I did.”

“The same way the people at the Metropolitan saw the Saskia cry?”

“Something like that, perhaps. There is always the possibility of hypnotism, or mass hysteria, though I confess I myself find it doubtful.”

“Did it have something to do with the beam of light? The sun reflecting on the ikon?”

“As we know, the sparkle of gold had misled many a man; perhaps the monks were even as simple as they professed to be. Perhaps it was their faith that believed the ikon wept and the statue articulated its joints. A miracle, or magic—who can say? The miraculous is always magical, and the truly magical is ultimately miraculous, but which came first? And what do such deliberations reveal except the extent to which our thoughts are circumscribed by language? I’ll ask an easier question: are you expecting that statue to move?”

The customary sardonic edge, returning to the master’s tone, cut through Michael’s reverie and made him aware that he had been staring at the carved stone figure for some time. And that somewhere in the back of his mind a struggle was taking place between his boundless aspirations and his certainty that they were impossible dreams.

“The need for belief is part of the essential nature of man,” the master continued. “He must, with all his heart, believe in something. If you wish that a statue should move, even that one, if you believe it is possible, I say to you that such a thing can be done, for as I told you I have seen it myself. What I saw was, perhaps, not a holy miracle, but a question of Christatos’s ability to attune his audience to his magic will. The ordinary man wills that he shall not believe, the magician wills that he shall. Which is stronger? It is a question of belief, the magician’s against the ordinary man’s. Like every other human being, you have much to learn, but there is little else that I can teach you. You have been a most satisfactory student; if I could be sorry, I would be sorry to leave you, but let this be our last formal lesson. I am tired now. I’d like to rest for a little while before the darkness finally falls.”

He fell silent at last, slipped his pipe into his pocket, and leaned back against the wall behind the bench. Michael recapitulated the story while it was still fresh in his mind, but he soon gave up any attempt to determine how much of it might be objectively true. The master’s little anecdotes and parables contained their own nuggets of truth—it was a question of digging them out.

He glanced back at the old man. His lids were closed, he had turned up his collar against the late afternoon chill and appeared for all the world to be dozing. Yet Michael doubted it; he was waiting for something that was yet to happen, some little event that would put its seal on the day. The sun had dropped behind the rooftree, spreading a heavy shadow across three quarters of the garden. The air smelled new and green, the hopeful fragrance of spring, though experience showed that such hopes were often nipped in the bud.

Something propelled him to his feet, then induced him to movement. He went and leaned over the wall, gazing out across the water. It was gray, going to black, and looking cold. There were lights: a large boat was moving downriver, buildings on the Palisades showed yellow windows, headlight beams moved slowly across the span of the bridge. The wind was rising, tugging at the young untested leaves of the apple trees. The outlines of low-lying objects—certain hedges, the newly manicured gravel path—were beginning to blur, and the gray stone of the statue had gone blue in the twilight.

The garden lay deserted, the courtyard empty. Everyone had gone, and the place had taken on a melancholy air. In the dark of the arcade it seemed there throbbed mystery, even frightfulness. Michael felt a deepening pang, wishing he were laughing with Dazz, wistfully imagining he was doing street mimes and looking for an Equity job, not doing a magic act and living in the house of a strange and perhaps mad old man. The thought of Emily crossed his mind like a promise of salvation. What did the master want from him? What was the purpose he was being trained and molded for?

He felt isolated and frustrated and stymied, like a man nearing the top of a high mountain only to discover that his joints ache, he can’t breathe, the view isn’t all he’d hoped, and the way of descent is obscured. Whatever strange capabilities the master possessed, whatever Michael had managed to glean from him, suddenly seemed to have no merit. What was this power he sought so desperately, and what would he do with it should he attain it? Heal the sick? Raise the dead? Make statues move? Such notions were the leftover pathetic dreams of a lonely boy, fantasizing about controlling a world in which no single element responded to his will. Fine for a boy, but for a grown man? He had exercised that coveted power in some degree, had felt it surge through and out of him, and yet he had no idea of its limits, no sense that he could ever wield it with total mastery; unlike himself, it was inexhaustible. A vision of the fiasco in Washington Square came to him, the howling and the flailing, his despair at having freed some savage thing he could never recapture or tame again. Could he ever control his power, if indeed it was his, or would it always control him? If a magician makes his audience believe a statue can move, who moves the statue, the magician, or his believing audience? The master was just preparing him to be subject to many masters, never to be his own. And what profit had the old man had of his own power? He was cut off from everything alive, he embraced corpses among strangers, his mind was fixed on death. Rightly considered, the magic will seemed to include the will not to an enhanced, fuller life, but to death, to the chaos and disorganization of death. In an agony of doubt, Michael imagined the master offering him a large cup brimming with some bitter-smelling liquid and instinctively turned away his head.

A gust of wind swept past him, and he shoved his hands in his pockets, abandoning the wall. It was then he realized that the master was no longer on the bench. He looked around. There was nobody there. The place had a ghostly air about it, and he could hear the echo of his own shoe leather on the pavement as he moved. He stopped again. In the corner of the arcade where darkness gathered, he caught a glimmer of white. Framed in an archway stood the master, his shoulders hunched up around his long neck as though drawn in against the cold. He was waiting. Waiting…for what? Michael started forward, then halted again as the master’s arm moved. His hand came up, pale bony fingers splayed against the shadowed colonnade, a theatrical, ambiguous gesture. The dark, brooding shape of the statue, heavy, mordant, enigmatic, stood between the two of them. The statue’s cowl caught the last rays of the dying sun, which washed it in a warm glow, bleeding onto the side plane of the face; brow, cheekbone, nose, beard, all took the light. Michael glanced at the master, then back to the stone face. And in that instant, before it happened, he knew it was going to happen. As his eyes remained fixed on it, the statue became animated. The head swung slowly toward him. The features were brought into full relief in the light, the cowl shifted slightly as real fabric might do. The blank, carved eyes stared out of the wash of sunlight, and then, quite naturally, as if the light had sensitized them, they blinked. Neither hand had moved, but as Michael’s eyes remained riveted, the right shoulder raised perceptibly and the head withdrew slowly into the cowl, as if it too felt the cold. Then the face turned away again, and the figure once more became stone.

Moving quickly toward it, Michael heard his feet crunching the gravel, but by the time he was within reach of the statue the sun had fled, leaving the face in shadow. The stone felt cold to Michael’s touch, and dew had already dampened the carved folds. He withdrew his hand and rubbed it against his jeans. Still looking up, he circled the base, then continued along the path to the colonnade. Ahead, he saw the wooden door just closing on the master’s heels. He looked again at the statue, whose hand came up in a slow, forlorn wave of farewell. Even as he looked, dumbstruck and afraid, Michael told himself he was being tricked—hypnotized; and, as he watched, he told himself nothing could be further from the truth. Then, as though the show were over, the hand came down and resumed its original position.

Overhead, the bells in the campanile tolled, and the bronze notes floated out over the rooftops. Michael did not look back again until he had opened the door to pass through. Then he turned once more. The statue was only a dark hooded shape seen through the row of pillared arches, and a pair of birds shot from out of the darkness and dropped lightly to perch on its shoulders. Before the door swung shut behind him, he heard it: the low laughter that came with the birds’ chittering, rising upward to meet the sound of the bells.

A
VE ATQUE VALE:
THE
large letters were set in a curving line that formed an arch at the very top of the poster. Within this arch, more uppercase letters of a slightly smaller size and in a different typeface announced a
GALA FAREWELL PERFORMANCE
! The illustration—Dazz had modeled it on the colorful, evocative posters favored by magicians of international repute early in the century—featured a lean, sinister figure in a black cape and slouch hat draping a golden chain, from which depended a large Eye of Horus, around the bowed neck of a younger, dark-haired man in evening dress: the master passing on the amulet, symbol of his power, to his successor. At their feet, several lines of copy exhorted the reader to come and see these wonders in person:

THE GREAT WURLITZER

yields the stage to

PRESTO THE GREAT

—Experience the Tempest Illusion—

Earth Water Fire and Air

as you’ve never seen them before!

Little Cairo Museum of Wonders

Saturday, June 14

7:30
P.M
.

Copies of this poster, placed at strategic locations in Manhattan, had combined with extensive word-of-mouth publicity to produce a packed house at the Little Cairo on this pleasant night in late spring. Indeed, many people had been turned away, to their great disappointment; however unorthodox and even disturbing the magic shows at the theater might have been from time to time, they had played to larger and larger audiences since its reopening, and even though the renovations sponsored by that canny investor and patron of the arts Samir Abdel-Noor had involved a significant increase in the Little Cairo’s seating capacity, it wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy the demand of a public eager to witness the most famous, not to say notorious, magic act New York City had boasted for many a year.

Samir himself, of course, was there, along with his retinue of friends and attendants: Jack Dazzario, the fashionable young painter; Miss Beulah Wales, medium and confidante; Gilbert Ramadan, bodyguard and factotum; and, reluctantly, Dr. John Mortimer, physician and enemy of magic, required by his patient’s delicate constitution and excitable nature to be near him precisely at such a spectacle as this, whatever he might think of Sami’s childish enthusiasms. There were, moreover, several colleagues and friends of Emily’s, a few young actors who knew Michael from his musical comedy days, a large number of amateur and professional magicians, and even some longtime patrons of the Little Cairo, to whom the recent transformations both in the theater itself and in the shows presented there seemed magical indeed. All these and others, many others, were in their seats; and the vast majority of them, particularly those who had seen the two magicians’ work in the past, awaited the beginning of the show with an avidity bordering on impatience.